Working Out and Eating Garbage

Sometimes, I do things that don’t make sense. I’ve stayed up all night so I don’t have to wake up early. I’ve eaten an entire cake in one day because I figured I shouldn’t stretch out the unhealthiness and could consolidate my terrible decision to one day. And just today, I jogged to the store, and then I bought bagels. I did a delightfully awful fitness and then rewarded myself with a dozen loaves of bread conveniently condensed into 6 large cheerios.

Idea for a recipe: put 50 bagels in a kiddy pool, add 35 gallons of milk, and jump in. Douse yourself in the filth of your carb bath, you slop monster.

There is a sort of paradoxical logic to the “I’ve been good, I deserve this” way of thinking. In part, it’s true: I have been good. However, the resulting not-goodness of eating more carbs than a frat party can drink totally negates the good I’ve done. That’s like getting a paycheck and immediately spending all of it because I can technically afford to. Yeah, I have the money, but now it’s gone and I’d deserve absolutely nothing good until the next paycheck comes.

“I have a coupon.”

No part of my shameful performance this morning was pretty. Running to the store, I sweat like a claustrophobic person at an elevator and cave-diving convention. I stopped three times to tie my shoes, and each time I stayed bent over and coughed some kind of thick pinkish greenish Nickelodeon slime. I cussed at a trashcan because it had a better figure than me. When I got to the store, I stumbled about like a drunk zombie looking for Safeway brand brains because I can’t afford the good stuff. I kept whispering to myself “where’s the peanut butter,” but not because I wanted peanut butter, but because I wanted honey, and everyone knows honey and peanut butter live together. I was a sweaty mumbling mess begging the aisles to show me where honey lived while carrying a trash bag of bagels in one hand, a pound of cherries in the other, and glaring at anybody who took more than half a second to fully observe the mess I had become.

The lesson here is obvious now that I’ve spent a day not learning it: I don’t deserve a reward for anything, and Safeway has hidden their honey from me because I look a little like a naked mole rat with a hangover and poorly fitting clothes.

None of us deserve anything when we tell ourselves we deserve it. It’s just a rationalization. A desperate rationalization, when all other rationalizations just don’t seem to fit in with the things we did. For example, we consider, “it’s for the greater good,” but that just doesn’t seem convincing, so we then move to, “because I’m worth it!” and it seems supportable as an argument. I don’t like cereal but your blog got me in the mood for a bagel. I’d eat one, but I don’t have any.